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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#91

Post by thurn »

Adrock wrote: post #40

I computed the Pareto optimal frontier of initial Wordle guesses, showing the tradeoff between maximizing green squares and maximizing yellow squares in this thread: https://twitter.com/adereth/status/1478435989982875648

This is interesting, you should re-do this analysis using the actual lists of 2000 valid words and 10,000 valid guesses, since it does fairly significantly change the math vs. a normal English dictionary (the word can almost never be plural, for example, dramatically reducing the frequency of S in the final position).

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#92

Post by jhas78asd »

biesnecker wrote: post #6

Over the weekend I wrote a tool to help me figure this out: https://github.com/biesnecker/wordlesmith Wordle's wordlist is interesting. There is a large (~10,000 words) list of words that it will accept as guesses but that will never be the answer, and a much smaller (~2500 words) list of words it will both accept and could be the answer. My tool's simple algorithm scores words by taking the product of the frequency…

Fun. I spent an hour and made this and just tried to score words with vowels and wheel of fortune consonants to start to make a good initial guess. IRATE came up. I like the frequency idea and the entropy discussion and have more ideas.

https://github.com/andyatkinson/wordle_solver

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#93

Post by cookie_monsta »

lucideer wrote: post #20

I've spoken to a lot of people who say they take this "exploration" strategy, but I think it misses the human language element of deduction. I've been playing Wordle for a while and while I'm no wordsmith, if you take an analytical strategy to word selection from line 2 onward it's never that difficult to get 3/6 (which I presume is the highest score attainable without significant luck). English is one of the most ir…

100% agree. Wordle is not a hard game - it has a pleasing mix of luck and skill, and while all the theories and strategising are interesting, none of them are really necessary. I don't understand the "exploration" strategy at all - playing "hard mode" means every guess is a possible winner.

I've done about 30 now and my highest amount of guesses was 5 when I had the "ank" of CRANK and from there it was pure guessing as there were multiple, equally likely (as I understand it) possibilities.

My best score was 2 guesses and it felt like a very hollow victory - just a lucky guess, really. 3 feels like you've done some work and yeah, 4 feels average.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#94

Post by ipsin »

propter_hoc wrote: post #28
ipsin wrote: post #21

This strategy seems to avoid words that Wordle will accept, while not choosing them as word-of-the-day, e.g. SERAI. If your goal is to minimize the number of remaining words in the worst case, I think SERAI is the winner, leaving you with at most 697 choices. [Assuming my code is right]

Genuinely curious, why would you use SERAI rather than ARISE? Functionally equivalent, doesn't seem like a made-up word, and might actually be the answer one day.

As CrazyStat hints, anagrams are not equivalent in Wordle, because changing the word order means that you're also changing the bucketing, the words in the anagram shifting between yellow and green.

To be more specific, I counted 882 possible words in the worst case using ARISE, versus 697 using SERAI.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#95

Post by carderne »

I did something similar including third guesses, but got bored before including letter positions. I included a whole bunch of words in case anyone wants to mix it up each morning. [0]

The main problem I think is that the words certainly aren’t chosen purely randomly, so the actual letter frequency could be completely different…

[0] https://rdrn.me/wordle/

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#100

Post by theshrike79 »

codefined wrote: post #47
nwiswell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word I took one step further and calculated the optimal starting word for obtaining green matches (I assume that this also makes it likely to produce yellow matches, although I did not explicitly optimize for that). Beginning with the full list of 5-letter words, I calculated the frequency of each letter of the alphabet in each of the 5 possible positions for a…

Interestingly, doing a similar analysis where we bucketed each word into 243 (3^5) buckets based on the possible result, we found "RAISE" as the best word. Source[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/popey456963/a654e98d0180566b897b70ee...

I did the same and ended up with ARISE.

My word list was alphabetical and the system picked up the first one :P

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